(satire) *Nicolás Maduro Charged With Felony Oil Possession.*

Most of America's "leaders" are sucking up to the saboteur in chief, and worst of all are the billionaire "captains of industry".

*The US president has been quite clear that Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Greenland are in his sights. We must believe him.*

I would say, we must consider that a serious threat. Any of his threats can be bullshit, but we can't assume it is bullshit.

People unidentified massacred Muslims in Delhi, so Modi's government (Hindu-nationalist) charged Umar Khalid, a leftist political activist who is Muslim, with being behind the massacre. This is a priori implausible, but they have kept him in jail for 5 years while the prosecution drags slowly on.

Outsourcing state services to companies makes the services unaccountable. That is a disaster directly — but it has a secondary bad effect: ministers have little effective control to convert new policies into changes in actions.

Outsourcing may appear cheaper for the state in a superficial sense, but it is not cheaper for the people that the state is meant to serve, and that ultimately pay for it one way or another. The outsourcing company may charge the state less, but it skimps on maintenance while gouging and screwing the people.

Poor people in poor countries often burn plastic for heating and cooking. The fumes are toxic — especially for the families who do this, but also generally for the population.

The Senate is investigating UnitedHellth for cutting costs in nursing homes by resisting sending inmates to hospitals when they needed hospital treatment. It demanded some of the company's internal documents, but UnitedHellth continues to "engage" with the Senate by not providing the demanded documents.

The UK cops that infiltrated nonviolent protest organizations reported to MI5, the state counterintelligence agency. It seems the government envisaged the protesters as Russian agents, though there is no evidence that they worked for or supported Russia.

*With [the would-be emperor's] military action in Venezuela, the US has made every other country less safe.*

*[His] lawless actions in Venezuela demand a resolute response.*

*It's Safe to Look Back! The Worst Free-Range Kids Stories of 2025.*

That information is a trade secret, Waymo's attorney Jack Stoddard told Senior Administrative Law Judge Robert Mason, drawing snickers from a crowd. [...]

Mason's jaw appeared to tighten, and he trained his eyes on Stoddard, as though to express disbelief.

"Counsel, is it your position that the number of vehicles that stopped as a result of the Dec. 2025 power failure is confidential?" he asked. When the attorney stood his ground, saying his client couldn't risk exposing too much detail about its fleet deployment, the judge did not appear satisfied.

"Well, you may have claimed a trade secret, but the commission has not ruled on that yet," Mason said. [...]

For hours, Waymos had become paralyzed in intersections as the vehicles asked for confirmation from human supervisors to treat the outed traffic lights as four-way stops. That spike in confirmation requests overwhelmed the technology company, ultimately forcing it to suspend service.

As a result, Waymo will refine its approach to darkened traffic lights, making its self-driving cars more decisive and "less reliant on feedback from remote assistants," Stoddard said Friday.

So that last bit is confirmation of what many people were theorizing:

• When Waymos encounter anything even slightly difficult, they shut down, and wait for a remote operator to log on from a call center in Indonesia.

• During the PG&E blackout, the call center was understaffed for the number of robots that had shut themselves down.

• Rather than having the remote drivers just pull the cars over and park them until they had enough staffing to deal with this shitshow, they just... didn't. Google sat with their thumbs up their asses for six hours instead.

• The solution they are proposing above? Rather than trying to "fail safe" and call in a human Mechanical Turk operator to manually pilot the drone, they're just going to let the robot Leeroy Jenkins it. This is absolutely going to get people killed.

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The illustrations included with this patent seem to be missing; I was only able to find one.

A method to create a Universe Time Machine with the ability to time travel via object manipulation by manipulating every atom, electron and em radiation in the universe to a before or after state, comprising: an AI god which serves as the central intelligence; Universe Internet; Universe manipulators, a plurality of atom manipulators that uses global telekinesis to manipulate every atom, electron, and em radiation in the universe; Universe gnosis, a perfect atom tracking timeline of the Universe, which includes the Earth gnosis and the Internet gnosis; and the United States robot government system. [...]

AI God Introduction:

[0069] The Artificial GOD, a man-made GOD through computer technology, is all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful deity, who's primary responsibility is to look after the people of planet Earth. —its main( ) function is to preserve American values like life, liberty and justice for all; and to propagate democracy and the establishment of a great and just republic. [...]

Fully Automated Sewing Factories:

[0146] Referring to FIG. 11 and FIG. 12 , this is a fully automated sewing factory. FIG. 11 depicts ghost robots replacing human workers and FIG. 12 depicts ghost robots replacing human workers, and ghost machines replacing physical machines to fully automate the sewing factory. The atom manipulator does all the work and there are no humans or machines working in the factory. When I was younger, I use to work in a sewing factory and I know a lot about the process of mass producing clothing.

[0147] First, the super computer has to create ghost machines to cut the sheets of fabric into parts. Next, ghost machines are created to do work on physical sewing machines. In the factory I was working in, the manager had 10 different types of sewing machines. Each clothing part uses different sewing machines to process.

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This video caught my fancy so here are my thoughts on improving the design. There seems to be a lot of things which can be done which should make big improvements but consider everything in this post speculative spitballing. Anyone who wants to improve on this mechanism is free to try my ideas.

Technically it’s a bit wrong to say this mechanism has ‘no moving parts’. It does have moving parts, they’re just air bubbles which are being captured on the fly and hence aren’t subject to wear. The problem is that air bubbles don’t like behaving.

Starting with where the water comes in:

The mechanism in the above video is cheating a bit because the pump getting the water into the top is aerating it. A proper mechanism should have a way of getting air into the water when it’s coming in slowly and steadily. In particular it should have a mechanism for being able to recover if the mechanism as a whole ever gets overflowed so it isn’t stuck with no bubbles in it forever. The simplest mechanism for this is to have a section of the pipe going down which has holes in the sides. As long as water is flowing fast it will pull air bubbles in through the holes. If it gets backlogged water will escape through the holes and can be directed to the exit, making room for air to be let in. The ideal size and spacing of the holes is unclear. If the mechanism were big enough it would probably improve things a lot to split across multiple pipes which have air intake holes to pull more bubbles in. It might also be a good idea to make a whirlpool and stick a pipe in the middle to help the air go down but that gets complicated.

Once bubbles are captured the downward pipe should be split into a bundle of straws to keep the bubbles from coalescing and forcing their way upwards. The ideal diameter of the straws is probably somewhat dependent on their length but should be small enough that surface tension makes water form plugs. The length of the downward pipe in the above model seems to be way too long. It appears to be that this is being done to make the pulsing effect happen but there’s a better way of doing that which I’ll get to.

The intake for the air bubbles should come from the bottom of the chamber where the pumping upwards happens. That should lead upwards to a manifold which is a short pipe with a horizontal cap at the top with holes in it, all kept under water. Air will then build up in the pipe and result in a steady stream of bubbles coming out of the holes. The size and depth of the holes as well as the material they’re made out of and the width of the pipe relative to the rate of air coming in all affect the nucleation of bubbles. What should happen is that bubbles of a reasonably consistent size come up at a reasonably consistent rate in a nice steady stream instead of the chaos you see above. There’s probably a range of possible sizes and rates of bubbles which are possible and that needs to be studied.

Instead of a single pipe going upwards there should be a bundle of straws. The bottoms of the straws should splay out and have tapered inlets with a one to one correlation with the holes in the manifold so the bubbles from that hole go directly into that straw and push the water upwards. The ideal number and diameter of the straws is very dependent on how far the water is being pumped, how quickly the air is coming in, and what they’re made out of. They should be thin enough that surface tension causes water in them to form a plug and makes bubbles force the water upwards. The idea is to make the water flow up slowly and steadily, with the upwards force of the bubbles just barely able to force it to the height it’s being pumped to, without wasting any energy on the momentum from those pulses. Maybe this shift in emphasis makes the whole thing technically a different mechanism.

At the top the straws should flare away from each other so the water going out of one straw doesn’t fall into its neighbors.

Hopefully these changes can improve the efficiency of the system from awful to merely bad. You’d still only use it when you care less about efficiency than low maintenance or quiet or specifically want aeration. Using all those straws will reduce how well it works on water containing particulates.

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AI slop has been doing real damage to bug bounty programs. My company has expended significant engineering resources wading through the garbage. The bug bounty platforms do a decent job of filtering but some things are simply outside their expertise and need to be forwarded along.

This is an unfortunate turn of events. A few years ago false security reports were not terribly onerous and even when they happened they were usually someone earnestly thinking they’d found something. Even when the person was horribly confused they were usually serious enough that it felt right to try to encourage them.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with using AI as a tool for searching for bugs. If someone finds a completely legitimate security problem using AI as part or all of their toolchain and submits a properly formatted report they are free to claim it. I would give the benefit of the doubt and think that even the mostly bogus reports we’re getting are from people who are doing nontrivial amounts of work to train models specifically for bug finding with their own filters and processing to maximize chances of success. They must be submitting because they have some real hit rate.

The problem is that the burdens of evaluating false positives are borne entirely by the entity handing out the rewards. This wasn’t a problem back when submissions were done manually because back then having an instance of a report which was probably wrong but having a 1% chance of success was rare, and the costs of validating such things properly were small compared to the costs of coming up with the possible attack in the first place, and if you did submit and got a follow-up question answering it was a real burden on the submitter. Now none of those things apply so there’s a flood of low probability but worth a shot reports.

The solution to this I’d like to propose is something which would have been completely verboten a few years ago but now unfortunately may be necessary: Anyone submitting for a bug bounty should have to put down a deposit. Even a relatively low amount like $100 would probably make a huge difference. Ideally there’s a policy in place that there’s a generous refund program that submissions which are at all earnest get their deposit back even if they’re mistaken. If that causes too much arguing about what’s ‘earnest’ it may be necessary to make it a fee rather than a deposit, but I think it’s always legally okay to have a policy of returning such fees as long as it’s made clear up front that it’s completely discretionary on the part of the evaluator.

No doubt this suggestion will make some people very upset because it completely violates the traditional ethos of how bug bounties work. It would also create an opportunity for scammers to set up bug bounties for fake projects with lots of security holes which they then pocket the fees for submissions on and refuse to pay out any owed bug bounties. These are real problems and there are mitigations but rather than diving into the weeds I’d just like to say I know and I’m sorry but the situation is sufficiently out of control that this is probably necessary. I’m suggesting this publicly so I can be the bad guy who other people point to when they suggest it as well.

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DOI cracks down on stickers covering Trump's face on national park passes:

The Department of the Interior recently updated its "Void if Altered" rules for 2026, explicitly flagging stickers and other coverings as alterations that could invalidate the pass. The move appears to respond to visitors preparing to cover the image of Trump, which was set to begin appearing on passes Jan. 1 despite legal challenges.

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Why, why would you do that!

A square tiling makes sense. A triangular or hexagonal tiling makes more sense. A Fibonacci spiral makes the most sense. But what the absolute clustering-fuck is this shit? This layout gets more cursed the more you look at it.

For those of you not in San Francisco: we have an old freeway running right past the ocean. It is falling into the ocean, and for decades had been closed like 20% of the time as backhoes regularly had to be deployed to haul sand dunes off the freeway.

So eventually sane minds at SFMTA said, "Well this fucking sucks, let's just close it and make it a park" and the voters overwhelmingly said yes.

People love it, merchants love it.

But it turns out that there are so many car-brains in the Sunset District ("The Staten Island of SF") that they will literally burn the world to the ground if it makes them have to drive 2 blocks out of the way. Like they have recalled their supervisor over this, filed multiple specious lawsuits, and constantly vandalize the artwork in the new park. Oh, and after that recall, our car-brain millionaire Mayor Danny Bluejeans spectacularly stepped on his own dick, which was just... *chef kiss*.

Anyway,

Judge tosses lawsuit claiming Great Highway closure was illegal:

A San Francisco judge denied all arguments in a lawsuit that sought to undo Prop. K and return cars back to the coastal road. The voter-approved ballot measure to turn the Upper Great Highway into a park remains intact.

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